Yesterday, I got caught in my first rush hour traffic jam, on Kharadi road.
It was awful.
Helmetless, I sweated and swore in a brown haze, blinking my eyes to keep out the rising grime, the swirling dust. My left hand, flexed permanently in a sweaty clasp over the tight clutch, began to hurt, its slippery surface sliding away under my frantic grip. My lumbricals, flexed permanently in a claw-like impersonation, were beginning to show the first sign of fatigue; every few minutes, I would dorsiflex my left foot and move the bike to idling, its neutrality a poor substitute for my own heat and anger.
A single bead of sweat had formed on my neck, spontaneously coalescing over C5-C6-C7, and forming a cheery raindrop perched above my atlas. Then suddenly, thousands of beads sprouted all over my back, and as the sun beat down more fiercely, they grew some more. Goddess Sita at her most lacrymal, bursting forth from the dusty brown earth. I flexed my shoulders, and suddenly the shirt was wet, its surface suddenly dotted with dozens of prickly dots, starbursts over the dull grey, their aura spreading all over, the shirt suddenly soaked with salty spray, with grimy sweat.
Some moron up ahead had taken his truck through the one way on the bridge, and similar morons had followed him like sheep. Soon there was a pile up at the mouth of the bridge where the onrushing traffic was not giving anything away, and the truck was in no position to reverse because of the idiots honking behind him urging him forward. Then some cycles, some bikes, some scooters and an army of autos came and piled up behind them and we had a full fledged jam. It piled up right behind this particular point also, all the way from the bridge-across-the-river to the bridge-across-the-railway-tracks. Almost two kilometres of idling metal, baking in the hot sun, swearing and cursing and shaking their fists at each other. The junta in the small shanty houses by the side of the road had dropped out of their houses to see the fun, inhaling lungfuls of carbon monoxide-meets-sooty arsenic fumes and caking their alveoli with a fine film of grime and dirt.
Kids were playing on the side of the road, the solitary cow was munching by the highway, stopping in between to let a long snaky rope of dung fall elegantly onto the road, folded neatly into itself. Somewhere in the middle of the mess, an idling car stalled, and created its own tiny pile-up right there, which was watched with renewed interest by the onlookers.
I inched forward some more, then sweating, I stopped and rested my vehicle on an outstretched left leg, the gears on neutral, the wheels absolutely still. Random stuntmen rejected from the latest Jackie Chan flick audition navigated the side paths in front of me, weaving their way over dung heaps and mud ditches, their bikes shuddering with the thrill of having stolen a few inches over their static companions.
The universal Indian traffic pecking order was reversed; the cyclists were laughing at the bike-wallahs, the bike wallahs were laughing at the car-men, the Carmen were cheekily putting their tongues out at the truckers, and the truckers? Well, they were just chewing their paan and watching the fun, their irritation arcing itself out of their mouths in long streaks of finely chewed betel.
Ptoooeeii.
Just like that.
